FLOSS Devices at Reasonable Prices

Disclaimer

This project is NOT endorsed in any way by the Free Software Foundation FSF. But the project is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Free Software.

We received on October, 2 2017 an email from the FSF requesting to not use the name GnuBee. As soon as a new name is determined we will update this site. The e-mail contains the sentence with Thank you so much for working to make freedom-respecting hardware

Introduction

The GnuBee Personal Cloud One (GB-PC1) is a network-attached storage (NAS) device specifically engineered to run free, libre, open source software (FLOSS). The GB-PC1 has all the functionality of any commercial, proprietary NAS, but at a much lower cost and with the transparency, reliability, and accessibility advantages that come with using FLOSS.

Free as in Freedom

We designed the GnuBee Personal Cloud One with the Free Software Foundation’s Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification in mind and have already initiated the application process with FSF.

The GnuBee Personal Cloud One can run several popular FLOSS suites for managing routers, NAS devices, or just general computing. These are some of the main suites the GB-PC1 can run:

Debian

OpenMediaVault

The OpenMediaVault project is a Debian-based network-attached storage solution designed for home and small office user who lack deep technical experience or knowledge of setting up and and administering an NAS.

libreCMC

Billed as “the libre embedded GNU/Linux distro,” libreCMC is a fork of the LEDE-project stable branch that uses only libre components.

LEDE-project

The Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE) project is a reboot of the OpenWrt community.
The GnuBee Personal Cloud One is supported by the LEDE-project in trunk.

FLOSS Devices at Reasonable Prices

GnuBee started with a simple idea: instead of hacking commodity hardware, let’s build the toys we want to play with from scratch . We want to show the world what devices running free software can do. The Personal Cloud 1 is our first product, though we have others in the works. If the GB-PC1 is successful, there will be plenty of others to follow!

How do we keep the cost of our devices down? Because we have both Chinese (Xiaoping) and US (Larry) roots, we have some major advantages over other teams. We don’t need to rent expensive living and work space in China (we stay with family!), and we don’t need to hire translators and other go-betweens. We can work directly with vendors and manufacturers. Because we are committed to working only with FLOSS projects, our software development costs are also reduced and distributed.